Fresh Pasta With Buttered Tomatoes

You can make fresh pasta at home without a single egg yolk, nonna, or pasta machine in sight. It’s easy, we promise! This style of pasta, with just two ingredients—semolina flour and water—is common in southern Italy. Look for the words “rimacinata” on your bag of semolina flour. This indicates a finer grind, which is best suited for pasta making. Regular all-purpose or bread flour might work in an egg-rich pasta dough but won’t quite cut it in this leaner version—the resulting pasta will be mushy and waterlogged after boiling.

Using hot water reduces the kneading time to mere minutes, and a brief rest yields a dough so silky it needs only a rolling pin to submit into springy, translucent sheets. For accuracy, measure out the water after it’s boiled and control the urge to make the dough too wet. It will seem a bit dry, but a quick knead and a short rest in a tightly sealed bag is transformative. When made correctly, the pasta is so easy to roll you shouldn’t even need to flour the surface.

The pared-back sauce, with plenty of late-season tomatoes and good butter, echoes this simplicity. Making the sauce in a large Dutch oven is key so there’s enough room to gently toss the pasta without the risk of breaking it.

Editor’s note 8/26/2022: This recipe has been updated to reflect the correct amount of semolina flour required for the fresh pasta.